The images of eyes, unblinking and the size of buildings, stared down from the slum on a hill—Rio de Janeiro’s oldest favela, Morro da Providência—and into the heart of the city. They emerged mysteriously, in the summer of 2008, not long after three young men from the community were murdered. The Brazilian Army and a powerful narco-mafia were implicated, and, when the news broke, residents of the favela rioted. For years, they had been living in near total social isolation; taxis did not go up the hill, nor did ambulances, not even the police. Half a dozen buses were destroyed during the riots, but afterward an uneasy calm took hold, and that is when the eyes began to appear. They were women’s eyes, printed in black-and-white and pasted on shanties made from brick and concrete. Some of them were framed in extreme closeup, some in shots that revealed faces that were melancholic, dignified, implacable. They posed an enigma, like something out of Calvino. Most news organizations, for security reasons, forbade their reporters to ascend the hill, so a news team in Rio used a helicopter to film the eyes, and a TV anchor begged viewers to call in and explain them. In this way, Morro da Providência briefly asserted its presence upon the city.
The person responsible for the images was not from the favela, or even from Brazil. He is a French artist who is known exclusively by his initials: JR. He is tall and thin, and his face is narrow, with pronounced, expressive features and a close-cropped beard. Whenever he is in public, he disguises himself with a fedora and sunglasses. He is only twenty-eight, but he has orchestrated large-scale guerrilla photo installations in the slums of Southern Sudan, Kenya, Cambodia, and India. In 2007, he shot portraits of Arabs and Jews, printed them on fifteen thousand square feet of paper, and pasted them throughout Israel and the West Bank. He called the project “Face2Face,” and he describes it as the world’s largest illegal photo exhibition.
By working at such a scale, JR has captured the attention of dealers and museums, including the Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou, and though he is most comfortable outside the gallery system, he sells photos of his work for tens of thousands of dollars. “JR is the most ambitious person I know,” Shepard Fairey, an early mentor, told me. Like Fairey, who began his career by pasting stickers of Andre the Giant in public, he first became known as a street artist. But his dealer in Paris, Emmanuel Perrotin, who also represents Takashi Murakami, Maurizio Cattelan, and Duane Hanson, believes the term is inadequate, and it’s easy to see why. JR’s preoccupations reflect a deeper set of contemporary artistic concerns: how to produce work out of human relationships, or “relational art,” as the critic Nicolas Bourriaud put it—conceptual pieces that blur the distinction between artist, subject, and spectator into a social puzzle. His studio in Paris is called Social Animals.
When JR heard of the killings in Brazil, he flew to Rio, walked up to the favela, and introduced himself to the first person he saw. For a month, he visited every day, meeting with local drug lords, ducking under shoot-outs, and earning the trust of the residents. Working just inches from his subjects’ faces, he took photographs of women—a number of them related to the men who had been killed—and he enlisted locals to post the images on buildings overlooking the city. Their participation, he believed, was central to the piece—not a means but an end. “That favela is in the center of town, but when you look at a map it is like it is not there,” he told me. “So the people were saying, ‘Hey, we are there, we are right there in front of you, and you pretend that we don’t exist.’ It was like, ‘O.K., my house is kind of fucked up. It’s not the best one, but we are not missing food. We are missing dignity, existence—people think that we are living like animals, and that’s what we want to change.’ ” When the media began investigating the pastings, JR vanished, forcing journalists to talk to the favela’s inhabitants. “More and more, people are conscious of how the media portray them,” he told me. “They want to control their image.”
People who are familiar with JR often refer to his “big vision,” which is another way of saying that, like many young artists today, he is not easily categorized. He is a photographer who is uncomfortable with photography. He is a flyposter. He is a filmmaker. His work in the favela belongs to a series titled “Women Are Heroes,” which is also the title of a documentary that he made about the project; last year, the film was warmly received at Cannes. In the spring, JR launched a million-dollar global participatory project called “Inside Out,” for which he will not take a single picture. Instead, he is encouraging people to take their own portraits, which they can send to him with a statement of purpose; he will print the photos on a large scale and return them, so that participants can paste them wherever they choose. “The idea is that you have to stand for what you care about,” he explained on Al Jazeera. “It is easy on Facebook, all these things, to say, ‘I love this,’ ‘I am against that.’ But to stand for your own image in the street? That’s another level.” The project will also advance JR’s growing personal ambition to remove his presence from the art that he produces. “Now I am just the printer,” he told me. “I wanted to test what would happen if I did that.”
JR announced “Inside Out” in Long Beach, California, while accepting this year’s TED Prize. In a twenty-four-minute speech, he stood onstage, wearing a custom-made blazer with a large black-and-white eye printed on it. He is a natural performer; as Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, says, having a conversation with him is a “mini art event.” While JR spoke, he moved with the kinetic physicality of Richard Pryor, dipping at the knees between phrases, raising his shoulders to gather momentum before launching into a point. “Art can create an energy,” he said. “Actually, the fact that art cannot change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions, and then enables it to change the world.” His earnest idealism fit neatly with TED’s ethos, and within days people from around the world had contacted him. Through a music producer in Los Angeles, members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe from North Dakota told him they wanted to participate. They photographed themselves in a tepee, and pasted hundreds of images across the prairie. “A lot of people forget that we still have a whole way of life, an existence of Native American people, and we wanted to put into perspective who we really are,” one of the organizers, DJ Two Bears, told me.
JR liked the images and decided to bring them to New York, as an addendum to the original installation—“a small window into the project,” he told me. On a rainy summer morning, he gathered his crew at the corner of Houston and the Bowery to paste a black-and-white photo—a closeup of Two Bears’ eyes, enlarged to the size of a tractor-trailer—on a freestanding wall parallel to the sidewalk. The photo had been printed on about twenty scrolls, numbered for assembly, which the team was trying to shield from the rain. JR was dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans. With his studio director, Marc Azoulay—a soft-spoken twenty-seven-year-old with Art Garfunkel curls and a perpetual two-day beard—he began pouring gallons of wheat paste from a large mixing container into buckets. (JR often travels with his own paste, because high-quality glue is not always easy to find. This can be a problem at airports.) “D’accord,” he called out to reassure Azoulay, who was struggling to steady the container as the glue oozed.
The wall, a vestige of a demolished handball court, has been a fixture of the Lower East Side since 1982, when Keith Haring cleared away piles of trash to paint a vibrant mural of dancing figures, swirling atomic particles, and laughing three-eyed rectangles. Haring erased his work after the paint faded, and for many years the wall was covered in graffiti. But in 2008, on the fiftieth anniversary of Haring’s birth, Deitch, who was then an art dealer in New York, persuaded the wall’s owner to turn it into an exhibition space. Since then, it has been stuck between opposing cultural frontiers: the illicit and the sanctioned, the commercial and the renegade. Last year, Shepard Fairey put up a mural on it—a pastiche of faux propaganda and his own iconography—and vandals attacked the piece, ripping away its bottom third. “Bring back Keith Haring,” one tagger wrote.
JR seemed unconcerned that his work might be attacked, and he wasn’t troubled that the image was so foreign to the context of the Lower East Side. He rarely expresses doubt about his art; paper and glue are cheap, and it is easy to experiment with them rather than to agonize before executing a judgment. Once he and Azoulay finished pouring the glue into buckets, he climbed a scaffold and began to smooth out the first strip. JR had flown Two Bears to New York to help, and, midway through the work, he called out to him, “You have to make sure the strip gets down to the bottom.” Two Bears, a large-framed man with a dark ponytail, was at the base of the scaffold. He tugged a strip. “It’s good down here,” he said solemnly.
When the wall was done, a few hours later, Two Bears’ eyes, accented by ceremonial paint, glared down upon the pedestrians. The image was confrontational—with the addition of a swoosh, it could have been an ad for Nike—but it seemed lost amid the visual distractions of lower Manhattan. JR works at the scale of a city block, or an entire neighborhood, and he has been pasting other Sioux closeups throughout SoHo and the Village; clearly more would have to go up before the piece attained the critical mass his work requires. The wall reminded me of a recent project in Paris, in which JR used photos from “Women Are Heroes” to cover nearly a kilometre of the embankment off the Île Saint-Louis. The piece was a logistical triumph—the most visible public-art project in France since Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Pont Neuf, in 1985—and some of the images, such as a naked Liberian girl about to give birth, were controversial. But it lacked the quality of social connectedness that marks JR’s best work. Fabrice Bousteau, the editor of the magazine BeauxArts and a close friend of JR’s, told me that he found the pasting somewhat disappointing, just a large collage. “I wanted to see it more linked to the context of Paris,” he said.
At one point, two women, a brunette and a blonde, approached the Houston wall on bicycles to put up their own “Inside Out” image. They said hello to JR, then ran across the street and posted a portrait of the brunette, wearing a fedora and brandishing her fists. “We’re doing a renegade,” the blonde explained when I walked over. The women left as quickly as they had come, and by the time I crossed back over Houston someone had taken their renegade down. Still, the act had an ephemeral vitality to it. “ ‘The photo is the art,’ you could say, but that would be a lie,” JR had told me. “What is most fascinating to me is the involvement.”
“Inside Out” can be thought of either as an extreme diminishment of artistic ego or as a celebration of it, with the artist’s brand propagated by many clones. When I first met JR, I observed that, no matter what the participants did, their images would still register as his art. “I do put a frame around it,” he acknowledged. “I mean, people send me their dogs and cats to print, and, no, that’s out of the project. But imagine: You go to North Dakota and you look at a pasting. You ask, ‘Who did that?’ The people there are going to say, ‘We took the pictures. We did the pasting.’ ” The project taps into old tensions running through conceptual art, but JR did not come to “Inside Out” by way of Marcel Duchamp or Joseph Beuys, or any other canonical figure; he came to it by way of graffiti, his first form of artistic expression. “In the beginning, ten years ago, I was going on rooftops and tagging my name,” he explained. “Now, by pasting other people’s work, actually I am tagging other people’s names.”
JR strictly guards his personal history, but he allows this much: his mother is from Tunisia, his father is of mixed European heritage, and he grew up with two sisters on the western outskirts of Paris. “For thirteen years, my parents were sleeping in the living room”—to give their children space of their own—“and it was only afterward that I realized, Wow, my parents were sleeping in the living room! You always think your surroundings are normal.” Beginning at the age of twelve, he spent six years working at a weekend street market, helping elderly salespeople. Because of this, he rarely goes out on Friday nights. He told me, “I knew that if I didn’t go once, some old people would be fucked.”
As a teen-ager, JR found a sense of confidence in the streets that eluded him at school. He was arrested often for juvenile infractions, and, at one point, his friends became involved in a feud with a group from a neighboring project. “I had to have Mace with me constantly,” he said. “One night, we were coming back from the train station, and they arrived. There was a fight, and we ended up at the police station, and the next day it was in the paper. This was a little feud, in a little suburb, but soon there were more and more articles written about it. Each time I read about it, it was completely different, magnified.” He broke from this circle of friends. “That is when I went into graffiti,” he told me. “Some of my friends went to jail, and I was like, Forget it.”
At first, JR’s attempts at graffiti were motivated by a simple thrill: claiming some bit of concrete for himself. “Maybe ‘art’ makes graffiti easier to explain,” he told me. “But I was fourteen, and I didn’t know shit about ‘art.’ ” He liked to d.j., so he used the tag Face 3, referring to an imaginary third side of a record. A year before graduating, he was expelled from school—he would not say precisely why—and moved in with a cousin living in the city. There he learned that graffiti is as much a conceptual act as it is a display of color and line. André, a prominent graffiti writer from Paris, told me, “What counts is how many tags you put up, the danger you’re willing to risk. How high will you go? Will you put your name on a police station? Graffiti is not really about the result—it is an action. You are working at night. It is physical, in that you are using your body, climbing, smelling paint.”
JR was not good at large, technical pieces, but the graffiti way of life appealed to him. “You communicate with other writers, by saying, ‘I am here,’ ” he told me. “I would take a train in the morning and see all those tags—who did what on which rooftop—and I would wonder how they got to that place, and if I could get there, too, or if I could go somewhere more difficult.” He worked odd jobs while taking classes to finish his diploma, and at night stayed out tagging on rooftops or in Métro tunnels. When he was seventeen, he found a battered point-and-shoot Samsung ECX1 that someone had left on a train. “It was a really bad camera, but it had a really strong flash,” he told me. He photographed friends tagging, and pasted up photocopies of the pictures. To make sure that they weren’t mistaken for advertising, he spray-painted red lines around them and wrote out “Expo2Rue,” a pun on “street gallery.”
In 2002, JR found his way into a collective called Kourtrajmé. The name is slang for court métrage, or “short film”: eight years earlier, two high-school students had founded the collective to make movies. The students came from prominent artistic families, and one lived a few floors beneath the director Mathieu Kassovitz, who was then working on “La Haine,” a film about disaffection and police brutality in the banlieues. They idolized “La Haine”—its politics, its style, its insight into the sublimated anger in French society—and Vincent Cassel, who played a lead role, became a mentor. “The word ‘art’ made them freak out,” Cassel told me. “They were too young, and it seemed too pretentious for them.” Over time, Kourtrajmé evolved into a clan of more than a hundred people, with interests ranging from photography to graffiti and hip-hop.
JR shot film stills with a high-end camera that Cassel bought him, and grew close to a French-Malian member, Ladj Ly, from one of the most impoverished banlieues, a housing project called Les Bosquets. When Ly took JR there to visit, he was shocked. “It felt like you were leaving France,” JR told me. “Some of the buildings were completely abandoned.” He pasted an Expo2Rue there, and when locals asked him to take their pictures he agreed, and enlarged the prints to billboard size. The project gave JR his first photo of consequence: a black-and-white of Ly, holding a video camera as if it were an automatic weapon. The photo tells a story of two cameramen in a mock standoff—the person in the picture challenging the person behind the lens to a duel—and it is both a portrait of Ly and a statement about the moral complexity of photography. Ly had been shooting footage of police brutality in Les Bosquets; he later released a sequence that showed cops beating a suspect, and policemen were arrested. “Without this weapon, I would be in prison,” he has said of his camera. But JR’s portrait presented him ambiguously. Behind him, out of focus, boys pose playfully, suggesting that Ly’s aggression is as much an act as it is real.
JR shared credit with Ly, and together they illegally pasted the photo in Les Bosquets. (A version glued onto reclaimed wood later sold at Sotheby’s for twenty-seven thousand dollars.) They hosted an “opening” to showcase the image, among others, and many locals attended. The police were less appreciative; they interrogated Ly, but because he was merely the subject of the photo there was little they could do with him. JR, meanwhile, was protected by his anonymity: the only signature on the posters was his initials, his new tag. “I left the country,” he told me. “There was a legal action, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. They couldn’t connect it with me.”
JR obtained a small advance from a French publisher to shoot a book about street art, and he used the money to travel across Europe and America. He returned to Paris a year later, and, not long after, riots broke out in Les Bosquets. Watching the upheaval on TV, he saw his pictures illuminated by a burning car. “It was kind of weird to see those images, and those eyes staring back,” he recalled. Nicolas Sarkozy, then the Interior Minister, had called the rioters “rabble,” threatening to wash them away with a hose, and a popular notion took hold that the rioters were a faceless threat. JR returned to Les Bosquets to take portraits of the rioters. He used a wide-angle lens, requiring that he stand inches away, to emphasize that he had their trust, and asked them to make grotesque faces. “They were making scary faces to play the caricature of themselves,” he later explained. “I pasted huge posters of them everywhere in the bourgeois part of Paris, with their name, age, and even building number.” Near a café, he pasted a portrait of a small black boy puffing out his cheeks; on a cobblestoned street, he put up a photograph of a teen-ager jabbing out his chin as if it were a baseball bat.
The images provoked an unexpected reaction. Dominique Bertinotti, the mayor of the Fourth Arrondissement, invited JR to cover an official building with them. “Some people were very uncomfortable with the pictures,” she told me. “I thought they were true and authentic.” The posters also caught the attention of François Hébel, a former director of Magnum and the head of Les Rencontres d’Arles, the annual photography festival. Hébel told me that he liked “the mix of the scale and simplicity” in JR’s art. He saw a gifted photographer who worked in the rough, like Nan Goldin, but understood how to manipulate images in context. A journalist from the Independent called, asking to be escorted into Les Bosquets. As JR explained in Long Beach, “That is where I realized the power of paper and glue.”
Earlier this year, JR opened a studio in New York, in a luxury apartment in Nolita, to serve as a temporary base for “Inside Out.” After he and his team finished pasting the wall on Houston, everyone retreated there for lunch. The space was bright and simply decorated, with a photo of Morro da Providência hanging on a wall. A large wooden table and an industrial printer occupied most of the room, and nearby boxes of rolled-up posters were waiting to go out. JR lives on the second floor with his fiancée, a French sculptor named Prune Nourry, and Azoulay; he maintains a workstation in the basement. An elevator runs between the floors, and when we arrived JR called everyone over to look inside it. The owner had set up an installation of lights, a fan, and a looped recording. “Some Buddhist chants for the pasting,” a card read.
The owner, a TED supporter, is lending the studio to JR. The TED prize comes with a hundred-thousand-dollar grant, and attendees of the talks are expected to help winners pursue “one wish to change the world.” Before the organization contacted JR, he was skeptical about accepting the money. With rare exceptions, he turns down offers of overt sponsorship. Last year, he initially declined to participate in a show at the Los Angeles MOCA because the catalogue displayed corporate logos; Deitch had to labor to persuade him that they wouldn’t taint his art. JR told me, “The fact that people can actually reappropriate their walls for their own messages at the scale of advertising—this is what I am working on. And this is why I am so careful about having no institution behind my projects, no brand, not even N.G.O.s. It cannot be about your organization saving the world.” JR decided to accept the prize only if the money was donated to a foundation that he established to run social programs in Morro da Providência and in other places he has worked. Instead, he funded “Inside Out,” his wish, by selling six photographs, which garnered eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Several people at TED provided support on JR’s terms, among them Majora Carter, a radio producer and urban-planning consultant from the Bronx. “I was moved to see how he helped people find their own way to express themselves,” she told me. “People at TED were offering to fund all the printing, and stuff like that, but I didn’t have that kind of cash. It got down to some folks saying, ‘It would be great if you printed peace signs or did something in the Mojave Desert,’ and I was like, ‘That is not what this guy is about. Are you kidding?’ I felt compelled to stand up and say, ‘JR, welcome to the South Bronx. I’d really like for you to come do a project with us.’ ” A couple of weeks later, JR visited Carter in Hunts Point. “I showed him the house across the street from where I grew up, which was a crack house,” she recalled. “I showed him a juvenile detention center, which I wanted to plaster with the images. And it was a really beautiful moment when we realized that we didn’t have to convince him.” She introduced JR to Danny Peralta, the director of arts and education at The Point, a community center affiliated with the International Center for Photography. Peralta had been carrying around a news story about him, showing it to people. “We were looking for JR,” he said. “We were either going to get him here or just emulate him straight out.”
In June, Peralta invited people from the community to launch a project, and JR returned to meet them. The group decided to photograph the eyes of women from Hunts Point, and print them on strips of paper; they would then take a second round of portraits, in which people held the strips over their eyes. JR encouraged everyone to find places to paste. “He said, ‘Let’s set up a date,’ ” one of the participants recalled. “He said, ‘We need at least two shoots per woman.’ He gave us a schedule. He gave out roles.” In less than a week, they took thousands of pictures.
The group had asked JR to help determine their placement, so after lunch at the studio he descended to his basement workspace and folded his long frame over a stool at his workstation: two iMacs on a wooden desk. He had a stack of photos of the area, and picked one of a boarded-up brick building on Spofford Avenue, where the participants had obtained the right to paste. He studied an image of a man with slicked-back hair; his face was serious, his lips together. JR flipped to a photograph of another man, smiling energetically with a toothpick protruding from his teeth. Each man was holding a printout of a woman’s eyes over his own. “The same way I shoot a picture I select a photo—by instinct,” JR said. After a minute or two, he settled on the man with the toothpick: his expression was warmer, but also difficult to make out. Was he amused, or was he grinning to keep the toothpick between his teeth? On one of the iMacs, JR framed the image over the corner of the building; the man’s forehead reached the roof, but a lot of brick was still visible. “You don’t always need to use the entire building,” he said. “But still you can feel that the building is empowering the image.”
By the next afternoon, the portrait was being wrapped around the brick façade. A middle-aged man named Robert Roman stopped and smiled. “We’re going to wrap the entire Point,” one of the community members told him. “Oh, sweet,” Roman said. “Great, sweet.” He watched the local participants, many of them covered in glue, as they stuck paper to the wall. He shook his head. “This building has been like this for years,” he said. “It’s an eyesore. If you go up to the roof, you’d see holes up there.” As images went up, the abandoned buildings became personal canvases; people recognized their neighbors, and the project registered as an indigenous expression. “That’s really our work,” Peralta told the Bronx Times. “To change the perception of Hunts Point from a crime-ridden, poverty-stricken community with hookers and crack, when it’s really hardworking people, doing a lot of interesting things.”
JR spent only a few minutes in Hunts Point before he noticed that he was attracting media attention. He was satisfied with the project, but he wanted the coverage to be about the local participants, about their ownership of the art, about what they were trying to say with it. When I returned to the studio, the following day, Azoulay was frustrated. “Look at this,” he said. On a laptop, he called up a feature from the New York Times’ Web site, a slide show about the Bronx pasting. “In five of the nine photos you can see JR,” he complained. One photo was a closeup of him squinting. JR said, “He kept trying to take a picture of my eye. He took, like, ten pictures. But I kept my eye closed.”
The studio was busy. By late summer, more than forty thousand people had submitted images, and half a million square feet of paper had been sent out to more than a hundred countries. A participant in Iran, at grave personal risk, had posted an image of a defiant-looking woman beneath a state-sponsored billboard. Russian gay-rights activists protested with the images and were briefly imprisoned in Moscow. At the end of the summer, JR launched a huge “Inside Out” project in Israel and the West Bank: four large photo booths, a roving truck to take pictures and print posters, and a twenty-five-person team. To raise extra money, he sold a large piece—photos pasted on found objects—for a quarter of a million dollars.
So far, “Inside Out” has generated its most interesting results in Tunisia, where installations began just after the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali stepped down, last January. JR showed me video taken in Tunis, part of a new movie he is developing. On an old fort where Ben Ali’s poster once hung, Tunisian volunteers began putting up six faces—among them a woman in a head scarf and a professorial man with a receding hairline. A crowd gathered nearby. In Tunisia, just about any image of a person on a public building had once been put there in the service of dictatorship. The “Inside Out” faces, by contrast, were unknown, and in their anonymity they implied a hidden power.
“Who are these people?” a man wearing a baseball cap, gesticulating wildly, yelled. “Are they politicians? Martyrs? Who are they?” He added, “No one consulted us. I can’t stand this attitude anymore.”
A thin man in a leather jacket demanded, “Either you put up the portraits of ten million Tunisians or nothing!”
Elsewhere, people tore the posters down ferociously. Near a school, a mob of people grew upset about the images, and an angry woman in a black blouse and sunglasses waved her finger as she admonished the crew. “There were martyrs during this revolution,” she said. “Some people died to remove Ben Ali’s portrait from this wall, so it’s not to be replaced by your pictures.”
The mob grew more agitated. JR had been standing back to allow the Tunisian volunteers to engage with the crowd; now a volunteer warned him that an outbreak of violence was imminent. “O.K.,” JR said. “Let’s go.”
When the video ended, JR had to rush out. He wanted to surprise Nourry by showing her a SoHo rooftop that he had discovered. Two days later, he flew to Edinburgh, and then to Paris, where I caught up with him. He looked exhausted; the relentless logistical demands of the project were wearing him down. He heard that Ladj Ly was in prison, and he tried to visit him, but a car accident on the highway kept him from getting there during visiting hours. Instead, he went to the Centre Pompidou, to look in on one of his largest installations—a huge photo booth at the museum’s entrance, where hundreds of people were coming daily to get posters of themselves. But the printer wasn’t working, and the crowd was growing restless. Responsibilities were piling up. There was an invitation to speak at Les Rencontres d’Arles. There were trips to Abu Dhabi and perhaps Africa. Letting go of his art, it turned out, wasn’t so easy.
At the museum, a man with a bronze tan called out. It was Ken Hertz, a Hollywood lawyer and a TED supporter, who had connected JR with Lady Gaga. (The pop star had a poster made for “Inside Out,” and promised to paste it.) Hertz invited JR to go out with him later, but JR, looking subdued, said he had to go meet Nourry. Outside, the sun was bright, and he pointed out rooftops where he had first tagged his name. “I can’t tell you what comes after ‘Inside Out,’ and maybe there is nothing,” he said as he walked. He grew silent. At a curb, he allowed a truck to pass. “I’ve been thinking, I could even kill ‘JR,’ ” he said. “Imagine, in ten years, or whenever I want, I could become the real me.”
As JR headed for his apartment—a tiny, cluttered one-bedroom, the first place he rented in Paris—he saw a dishevelled man. “He is a figure here,” he said. The man was from Tunisia. “He had a normal life and stuff,” JR said. “He was beating his wife, and so she went back to Tunisia, and he went into the street. Everyone knows him, and since then he is regretting it so much, and he never leaves that corner.” Nearly every day, the man obtained discarded food from a grocery, ate what he could, and displayed the rest for nearby residents to take. He was visibly upset; his things were in a jumble, and the police had told him that he had to move. He had been given a number for an agency that assists the homeless. JR dialled it, but the group had little to offer. So he put his phone away, and continued to ask questions, giving the man an opportunity to express himself, no matter how inexactly, acknowledging him like a neighbor. ♦
